Eike Frost wrote:
A line has to be drawn somewhere. It's impossible to support all/all/all. Now, where that line should be drawn is a subject of hot debate :)
In a sense you're right. It'd be silly, as someone pointed out, for us to try to support proprietary extensions to HTML from Netscape 3.0 which eventually went away. But if current modern standards-based web pages break an old browser, we can at least try to send those browsers a very simple plaintext page.
(personally, I think a site should conform to current accepted and implemented standards such as xhtml 1.1, css1/2, svg, etc. and not worry too much about browsers that don't render those well (as opposed to not at all, in which case a transformation to plaintext may be needed as an alternative).
What I'd say is that Wikipedia is the sort of site that is 99% usable even in an extremely plaintext layout. Very simple html does a passable job of rendering article text. So if we hear that the site sucks in some frightening old browser, it is a valid option to just serve that browser a very simple plaintext version.
--Jimbo